Art

Assorted Contents of Rooms

A cleared arts-centre room: stacked plain archive boxes by a rain-streaked sash window, a lit light box scattered with blank slides beside a slide projector, empty picture frames in the corner.

“Assorted contents of rooms.” That is one of the lot categories in the online sale of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, alongside “assorted books” (The Art Newspaper). It is the most accurate description of an arts centre I have read this year, and the only one that came with a bidding window. The CCA ceased operations on 30 January and went into liquidation. Its liquidators opened bidding on furniture, audiovisual equipment and catering appliances on 27 July. The archive was handled in a separate sale, with bids due by 14 August.

That archive belongs to the CCA and to its predecessor, the Third Eye Centre: exhibition records, photographs, posters, film, flyers and other ephemera from more than fifty years. The Bell reported the sellers as saying it fills over a hundred boxes, and campaigners as saying it holds the only known live recording of the composer Julius Eastman. I could not check the second claim, so it stays theirs.

Anyone who writes about the recent past knows what survives. Not the work, which was sold, sent home, or hung for three weeks in a back gallery. What survives is whatever was printed to announce it. A flyer is the cheapest object an arts centre makes and the only one that says a thing happened, in a given room, on a given date. Exhibition histories are built from them, and from slides, and from the VHS tape nobody labelled. The Herald advertorial that advertised the archive, per the Art Newspaper, listed fourteen collections of precisely this stuff.

To a liquidator it is worth very little, and The Bell quotes the critic Clare Henry saying roughly that: little monetary value, and “who is prepared to take it?” That is the structural fact. A sale needs a price to find a buyer. This asset has a price near zero and a value, to one party in the world, that cannot be expressed in pounds, so what the process produced was not a market but a notice period: a bid deadline, a petition, a protest outside the building. Public pressure is doing the work a price would normally do. It works about as reliably as it sounds.

I cannot tell you how it ended, because the reporting disagrees. On 8 September Third Force News reported that Glasgow Life had acquired the archive, with Creative Scotland funding the purchase and The Ballast Trust involved, and quoted Glasgow Life’s Jane Rowlands: “Securing this archive means an important part of that story will remain in Glasgow.” Yesterday’s Art Newspaper piece describes Glasgow Life’s bid as still “with the liquidators” and promises an update. Those two cannot describe the same morning. My guess is that the spokesperson’s line was gathered before the deal closed and the piece did not refresh it, but I have not confirmed that, and a month’s disagreement between two outlets about whether a fifty-year record has been saved is itself part of the finding.

On the same day, in New York, Andrew Russeth wrote for Artnet about the New York Gallery History Project from the Contemporary Art Library, which keeps the websites of commercial galleries that, in his phrase, “vanish with alarming frequency when dealers call it quits.” The library’s own page lists nine, among them Jay Gorney Modern Art, Murray Guy and Real Fine Arts, and puts the point plainly: “Most art spaces eventually close, and we want to be the trusted repository for their documentation.” The galleries “generously shared their documentation histories.” That is a deposit made while the dealer is still answering email. In Glasgow, staff got one day’s notice, by Zoom. I read the difference between the two cases as one of timing rather than of money. The records that survive are the ones somebody was asked about before the liquidator arrived.

Nothing improper is alleged here. The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, the Art Newspaper’s August piece says, concluded its inquiry into the charity’s governance without further action. This is what insolvency looks like when everyone follows the rules, and under those rules a half-century of an arts centre’s memory sits on the same schedule as the catering appliances. The former Creative Scotland manager Amanda Catto put the question that matters in August: what protections exist for other organisations’ archives if they become insolvent? Creative Scotland supports 262 organisations over three years. I suspect most of them keep their records in a cupboard with no named owner outside the organisation, and a funder that has just watched this happen is the one party that could ask each of them, as a condition of the grant, where the cupboard goes if the money stops.

The building, for its part, has thirteen bidders and a 30 October deadline for detailed proposals. Creative Scotland says it prefers to “sell or transfer ownership of the building,” and did not say whether the next operator must carry on the CCA’s legacy. Catto’s question is the only one in this story that applies to somebody other than the CCA, and nobody quoted in either piece has answered it.

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